Been there, done that

Rating: 2/10 (18 November 2003)

If you have seen the following movies: THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, starring Vincent Price; THE OMEGA MAN, starring Charlton Heston; NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD/DAWN OF THE DEAD/DAY OF THE DEAD and THE CRAZIES, all directed by George Romero; RABID and SHIVERS, directed by David Cronenberg; THE QUIET EARTH, starring Bruno Lawrence; LIFEFORCE, directed by Tobe Hooper; TWELVE MONKEYS, starring Brad Pitt; THE STAND mini-series, written by Stephen King; WARNING SIGN, starring Sam Waterson; DEMONS, produced by Dario Argento; THE EVIL DEAD, directed by Sam Raimi; OUTBREAK, directed by Wolfgang Petersen; the woefully bad REIGN OF FIRE, starring Christian Bale; and a slew of other post-apocalyptic movies, like THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL or THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE, etc, well, you've already seen 28 DAYS LATER.

There's very little original in it. Some of the similarities were quite obvious: THE OMEGA MAN has Heston fighting the vampire/zombies (who only appear at night) with a black woman. In THE QUIET EARTH, Bruno Laurence is seen naked on a bed, almost like the scene in 28DL. Bruno also walks around a deserted city with messages written all over the place. In Tobe Hooper's LIFEFORCE, London is devastated by aliens and the whole city is filled with crazed zombies running amok. There's even a scene with a church filled with dead people/zombies. Like whoa! This pointless film also reminded me of REIGN OF FIRE, a recent & really bad movie set in a post-apocalyptic London. The tone of both films were pretty much the same: I couldn't care less over what might happen to the boring characters.
Seriously, 28 DAYS LATER is extremely derivative and it reminded me a lot of the Roland Emmerich & INDEPENDENCE DAY school of filmmaking: take your ideas for your script from every film or book imaginable. Everyone has made fun of Roland Emmerich or other Hollywood filmmakers for doing this and yet many have applauded Danny Boyle for doing the very same thing because it's a "low budget" independent movie. Yeeesh. Well not me. This movie is redundant and because I've seen all of the films mentioned above, I didn't like 28DL simply because I've been there and done that.